BlackBerry 10 may have gotten the ball rolling, but there are a whole lot more new smartphone operating systems set to launch this year. Back at the beginning of January we heard the official announcement about the latest one to make its plans public, with the coming launch of Ubuntu for smartphones. Later, at the CES, we got to check out the software in operation on a Galaxy Nexus. While we first heard that the initial run of smartphones shipping with Ubuntu wouldn’t get here until 2014, it now looks like they’ll arrive quite a bit sooner, at least according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

Instead of 2014, now the first Ubuntu phones should arrive sometime this October. Shuttleworth describes this launch as being planned for two large markets, but has so far declined to specify just which those might be. There’s a chance that North America could be one of them, with Shuttleworth calling it “a key market for Ubuntu,” but nothing’s necessarily confirmed.

Far before we see these Ubunutu-from-the-ground-up phones, developers will be able to get a head start with the platform when the Ubuntu ROM for the Galaxy Nexus (the one from CES) is released sometime this month.